Kids and Swearing

“There’s no struggling here,” he says. “A child can easily put a quarter in the jar, but can also feel a loss. A child can see concretely the effect of the swearing by seeing the roll get smaller. And in the end, there’s positive reinforcement with the quarters that are left.”

RESOURCES

There are books on the subject that come at the issue from a child’s perspective.
• Elbert’s Bad Word, by Audrey Wood (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich). This entertaining and well-written book deals with a little boy’s first contact with a particularly ugly word. “The word floated by like a small storm cloud. It was ugly and covered with dark, bristly hairs.”